Plans for Fink's production rehearsals are plunged into a skipful of turds by one of those professional rehearsal spaces turning round at the eleventh hour and calmly announcing that they don't allow use of a smoke machine. Panic! Fink's entire live show is based around a smoke machine. I'm personally lost if I can actually see the rest of my band through lack of fog.

Sobriety happened immediately. As a couple of friends took him to the hospital, I remember sitting on the stairs trying to process what had just happened and being completely unable to comprehend how anyone could do something like that.

He recoils with a faintly amused expression on his face, shrugs, then glances around for an appropriate piece of hardware with which to impale me. He seizes a nearby spare mic stand, and so begins a Tom and Jerry style chase around the backstage area, me leaping over flight cases and knocking guitars to the floor in my efforts to escape... My tour bus dreams are getting stranger.

There is one situation in which an encore is definitely not such a good idea. Frowned upon, in fact, by just about everyone in the venue apart from the audience cheering for it. And that situation is a festival. For a festival to be a success, it must run on time.

This is the second in a series of New Breed blogs introducing some of my favourite breaking bands that have captured my ears in 2014. Every summer hails the emergence of a new breed of young, up and coming bands heading out on festival season opening up muddy fields and tents across the country ready to make their name known to the world. Here are 3 of the best new bands destined to make big waves through the end of 2014.

Broadcaster Paul Mason put it best: the first law of sociology is that all youth subcultures eventually come back. First it was a post-punk revival in the mid-noughties, then nu-rave later in the decade and lately we've been reminiscing the nineties. Is it now Northern Soul's turn for a revival?

You want to be at the front of the gig? Good. Get to the venue early and queue up like everyone else. Don't wait until the gig has started and then push your way through the crowd to the front - especially if you end up hurting people, knocking them over and splitting up people who want to be able to enjoy the gig together.

Northern Soul wasn't so much a scene to many, as much as it was a way of life. These tunes were the most obscure of the obscure, plucked from indie labels in the ghettos of Detroit and Chicago. Some songs were only ever intended as demos, and here in the UK they found a new lease of life.

In my perfect world, every one of my top 50 would be in heavy rotation on every radio station in the planet. These bands would be filling massive stadiums and spreading the gospel of their brilliance. But alas, that isn't the case.

This month sees the release of June Gloom by American/British duo Big Deal (Kacey Underwood and Alice Costelloe) and the title of this album seems fitting. While there is beauty in the delicate riffs and slow build-up of certain tracks, there is also a melodic shift into darker territory of grunge infused rock and roll.

The Brit Awards 2013: a masterclass in politeness, pleasant behaviour, modesty, good old formulaic pop music and accomplished banjo strumming for anyone over 21. Their mother's would have been proud. But that's precisely the point, their mothers shouldn't be proud.

This has been said before, in many different ways, languages and levels of exasperation, but I'll reiterate: Mumbai is fucking crazy. Twelve and a half million people living on an island less than half the size of London.

Far from a muted epilogue, Strangeways is The Smiths turned up to 11: more heartbroken, witty, lascivious and adventurous than ever before. The explicit politicking may be absent, but this was never as central to The Smiths as the sloganeering album titles suggested: Morrissey was always more preoccupied with romantic than political malaise.